Rationale

“Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak.” — Rachel Zoe

“Style is primarily a matter of instinct.” — Bill Blass

“Fashion fades, only style remains the same.” — Coco Chanel

“Create your own visual style…let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.” Orson Welles

Google “style quotes” and you’ll get a slew of pithy phrases that emphasize not only how important it is to be distinct but also how style is unspoken, instinctual, persistent, and the way by which others will identify you. Most of these quotations tend to be about fashion, as the names above suggest, but style is, of course, much more than bow ties, bright socks, and shoes with red laces.

When we discuss literature or art—and comics are both!—style is always near the heart of the matter. It is style, perhaps, that distinguishes the “literary” from the potboilers on the bestseller lists. It is what makes it clear that a painting was created by Monet, Manet, or Man Ray or a photograph by Lange, Sherman, or Greenberg or a comic by Bechdel, Waterson, Jaimes, or Herriman. It is often why we choose to continue reading an author of whose style we have grown fond.

As we are wrapping up our examination of Charles M. Schulz’s comics for the semester, it is worth considering his style. We know that his art changes over the years, the 20-year evolution of Snoopy’s physiognomy being evidence enough on that point. But what about the words that he uses in his speech balloons? Do they change over time? What’s more, do his characters speak in ways that distinguish them? Did he want each of them to have their own vocabularies or manners of speaking, and would this have been impossible to effect since there was just one author behind it all?

Fortunately, discriminating between small nuances of style is something that computers can help us with. For this project, we will be taking a stylometric approach to Schulz’s work, building on the comics that we (and last year’s class) have been encoding in XML. Although stylometry is often used for authorship attribution, we can use the same methods to detect whether Schulz’s style changes appreciably from his first decade to his third, as well as among his characters.

Nitty Gritty

For this assignment, you will conduct a stylometric analysis of the speech balloons in Schulz’s comics and begin the process of interpreting your results. The assignment has one outcome: a collaboratively written Google Doc. This document is due at the end of class, Tuesday, 5 April.

Step One: Get the Data

I’ve created a folder in our repository for our stylometry experiments. You should work with the files in the 2022 subfolder. You can each work with the files from the repository on your local devices, but be aware that if you start making commits to the repo that you will probably overwrite each other’s work and produce the dreaded MERGE CONFLICT.

The data here come not from our encodings, since we haven’t finished the years in question. Instead, it comes ODH’s transcription of Peanuts. I’ve narrowed the data to only characters who have 100 or more speech bubbles across the corpus, which is a total of 24:

‘Boy’, ‘Charlie-Brown’, ‘Eudora’, ‘Franklin’, ‘Frieda’, ‘Girl’, ‘Linus’, ‘Lucy’, ‘Lydia’, ‘Marcie’, ‘Molly-Volley’, ‘Patty’, ‘Peppermint-Patty’, ‘Pig-Pen’, ‘Rerun’, ‘Sally’, ‘Schroeder’, ‘Shermy’, ‘Snoopy’, ‘Spike’, ‘The-Beaglescout’, ‘The-World-Class-Literary-Ace’, ‘The-World-War-I-Flying-Ace’, ‘Violet’

• The char-day folder puts all the speech acts from a single character in one strip into a single file. Marcie_1980-07-05 has all of Marcie’s speech for that one day.
• The char-day-restricted folder does the same as the above folder but only for the years that we’re reading in class (1950-1952, 1971-1972)
• The gender categorizes each character by gender, with either a leading m_ or f_. This will allow Stylo to color its graphs by gender.
• The gender-restricted folder does the same as the above folder but only for the years that we’re reading in class (1950-1952, 1971-1972)

Step Two: Style the Data

Using Stylo, you should collectively process each of these data sets. Make sure you set Statistics to PCA (Corr.) under the Statistics tab and that under the Output tab, you select PNG.

Consider changing the PCA flavour from Classic to Loadings on the Output tab.

Step Three: Analyze  Schulz’s Speech-Balloon Style

After getting each of the outputted graphs from Stylo, open them in an image viewer so you can zoom in and out as necessary. Do the characters appear to cluster? Which characters are near the center of the graph? Which ones are near the margins? Where are the prominent clusters in the graph? Do the characters group according to gender? To what degree does the decade of the strips’ publication seem to make a difference? What is surprising in the output and what is expected?

Step Four: Write about Schulz’s Style

Write about your modeling and your data using Google Docs. The write-up is due by the end of class on Tuesday, 5 April. The post should contain the following information:

• The output images for each of your four options, making sure that each is clearly labeled.
• Collectively, identify which of the abovementioned options you think is best for understanding Schulz’s speech balloons and why you think that is the case.
• Collectively, write 2-3 paragraphs to report on what you observed in Step Three.
• Individually, write a paragraph that discusses what you have learned from this approach that you did not learn through either TEI markup or topic modeling.
• Individually, write a paragraph that discusses what you learned about digital humanities from this assignment.

Grading

This assignment is worth 50 points. You will be graded on whether your Google Doc has all the required items; the quality of the work that you did in trying and evaluating different Stylo settings; and your analysis of the output that you generate.

Credits

This assignment was created in 2018,  based on my topic modeling assignment and then updated in 2019. I’ve shifted it in 2021 so we can consider it in relation to Peanuts. This assignment is distributed under the terms of a CC BY 4.0 license.

Obvious credit is due to the authors of the Stylo package for R: Maciej Eder, Jan Rybicki, Mike Kestemont, and Steffen Pielström. I also appreciate my colleague Jeremy Browne, who trod the stylometric waters a few weeks prior to me and stood ready to answer questions and share scripts.